“An accessible approach to alchemy” explored at Eliza Swann book release this Saturday (6/27)
Interdisciplinary artist, alchemist, and author Eliza Swann celebrates the release of her new book The Alchemical Imagination: Creativity as Catalyst for Radical Transformation, in conversation with author Annie Connole at Desert Trade in Twentynine Palms this Saturday (6/27) at 5:00 p.m. Reporter Gabriel Hart chatted with Swann about their new book and what alchemy means in practical terms within our modern age.
Eliza Swann’s The Alchemical Imagination is structured around the twelve stages that the fifteenth-century alchemist George Ripley outlined for creating the Philosopher’s Stone. Each chapter explores each one of these stages through multiple lenses: as a laboratory procedure, a philosophical inquiry, a symbolic system, and a series of creative prompts that readers can engage in themselves. An expert teacher of modern alchemy across disciplines, Swann traces the principles of alchemy through its applications in proto-chemistry, healing arts, psychology, visual art, and literature, so readers can develop the tools needed to arrive at their own Great Art.
“Alchemy originally is a natural science. Because the scientists didn’t have access to equipment that allowed them to see into spaces where their physical bodies wouldn’t go, they incorporated philosophy, trance work, and poetry into how they accessed the more inaccessible sort of intelligences in nature. So it is a laboratory science as well as a natural science, and it is in many aspects an empirical type of science, but it’s radically interdisciplinary,” said Swann.
The book aims to make alchemy accessible in practical terms, since Swann says alchemy is inherently arcane and often introduced in initiatory slogans, like the one her own teacher used: “Looking with Two Eyes That Can See.”
“For her that meant that she would look at the world through a solar eye, which can see cause and effect, measurable impacts, empirical data, different seasons, and timing. But also as an alchemist you have to look at the world through the lunar eye, which sees everything as interdependent and actually sees reality as this big wave of consciousness and if you put the solar and the lunar eye together you have the 3D map of reality.”
Saturday’s event will be moderated by Annie Connole (author of mythic memoir The Spring), who is an alumnus of the Golden Dome, a non-profit art school for mystics founded by Swann in 2014. The event invites the audience to reconsider alchemy as a living practice of responsibility, renewal, and imaginative possibility—revealing how creative transformation can shape our response to the challenges of the present.
The event begins at 5:00 p.m. this Saturday, June 27 at Desert Trade, located 6750 Sherman Road in Twentynine Palms. Free and open to the public.
